From the back cover:
"GiTonga speaking basket weavers, mostly women, from Inhambane in the Southeast of Mozambique make colourful 'sipatsi' purses, and handbags. They are very creative in inventing new decorative designs and patterns.
This book, resulting from thirty years of enquiring, collecting and observing, is unique. It presents a series of 'snapshots', which collectively constitute a short film that records an unfolding exploration of personal and collective memory, of symmetry, of combinations of colour and pattern, and of variations of order and logic to create new designs. The book includes a catalogue of over 700 different decorative patterns.
In the last ten years, several new phenomena have been observed, ranging from colour transformation, introduction of plane patterns, to decoration of new types of objects, like hats, and the implicit use of codes.
The 'didactical baskets' and the ways women and girls work together when weaving 'sipatsi' may stimulate some useful reflection about relationships between education and culture. In several chapters, activities and problems for exploration in mathematics (teacher) education have been presented, underscoring the scientific and educational wealth of the 'sipatsi' as a mathematical construct.
The book contains a Preface by Alcido Nguenha, Minister of Education of Mozambique (2000-2005), a Foreword by Dr. Emilia Nhalivilo, Deputy Director of the Centre for Mozambican Studies and Ethnoscience, an Afterword by Dr. Hippolyte Fofack, Founder of the Nelson Mandela Institution, after Afterthoughts by Dr. Joan Conolly of the Durban University of Technology. It includes an introduction to Tonga basket weaving by Gildo Bulafo an an introduction to the VaTonga by Dr. Gregorio Firmino" (422 pp.) Published in 2009: expanded and updated edition of the earlier 1994 and 2003 edition. Published by: Lulu.com (available from: http://stores.lulu.com/pgerdes). Also available is the supplement: Sipatsi Images in Colour (52 pp.).